It’s a while since I’ve written but I’m still growing my own HRT, eating mung,  red clover, fenugreek, cress or broccoli.  I eat them as part of my salad for lunch and I add them to a big old juice or smoothie in the evening before dinner. I also add wild foods, dandelions and nettles mainly. I make sprouted buckwheat and lentil loaf. I love it all, it makes me feel that I’m looking after myself, it’s my defence against the world, all the nasty chemicals and poisons. I’m almost 58 and everyone tells me  that I’m glowing. However a little while ago the flushes came back. I didn’t want to put the amount of sprouts I ate up, and the sweats weren’t madly hot.  “Mmm cold sweats, what could that mean?” I wondered. I did a bit of research and found that hot sweats tend to be lack of oestrogen and colder sweats, lack of progesterone. There was no science I could find to back that up but I decided it was worth experimenting on myself (again!). So I bought some natural progesterone cream. I didn’t want to go on the synthetic progesterone from the doctor as its not extra molecules that are not good for us (see my book for more on this). It only took a week or so for the sweats to go. I thought, oh no, I’ve written a book on grow your own HRT and now I’m getting it out of a tube.

Not sure what to do I just kept rubbing it on my wrist each night and feeling guilty. A short while later I went on a foreign holiday, (this was before lockdown and it was normal!), I couldn’t sprout but I could take my cream. 

I was strangely delighted when my sweats started up again. Ahh so the sprouts are doing something that the cream can’t do alone – phew I didn’t spend three years writing a book for nothing!

So  I went back to growing my sprouts, the sweats stopped, but I was still using the cream. I wasn’t sure what to do about my sprouting talks but when a local group of women invited me to do a second talk, I decided to be honest. At the end of the talk I sat down, pulled my chair closer to them, lowered my voice and I explained what had happened. 

“But it worked for five years?” one of them said. “Yes, “ I replied. “And now it half works and I honestly and truly believe that growing sprouted foods is really good for you in so many other ways.”

I didn’t sell any less supplies that night than usual and I felt an enormous relief about being truthful. 

So  here’s what I think. Keep sprouting, if it works for a while, keep doing it. I might mean you need less other stuff, it also helps fight the synthetic hormones that are everywhere, it gives you trace elements of nutrients that you might have to pay expensive pills to get otherwise.

Why doesn’t it completely work? I know I have problems with my gut bacteria and many women do, also we live in an unnatural world, we are bombarded with chemicals and EMFs, radiation. I do my best to be organic but its impossible to be 100% if you want a social life, to go to friends for dinner. Our clothes are doused in chemicals, I filter my water but I hear that’s not enough to get all the bad stuff out. But I do my best, and right now the natural progesterone cream and the sprouts together are keeping me healthy, happy and flush free.